Today I received a call that my husband’s compost – his birthday present from his mother – was delivered this morning, and of course this means I have a full weekend planned.
I have only gotten as far as outlining the Sunny Border – a project I’ve imagined ever since we took over custodianship of this garden – so I need to dig away the turf and fluff up the soil beneath, mixing in a good measure of compost.
The other day I bought something I don’t particularly like; a long piece of 8″ deep corrugated plastic to serve as a boundary between the Sunny Border and the lawn, simply so the grass won’t invade the new border the same way it has invaded the Ambitious Border. I might invest in more of this once I’ve weeded out all the grass in the Ambitious Border.
It’s not pretty, for sure, but since it will be fully buried in the ground I guess I can live with it. I would have preferred a more natural material, but buying the wood to make something similar would a) be too expensive and b) probably be worse for the environment in general, since that wood would have to be cut, transported etc. to get to the garden.
In other news the dogwood and forsythia branches that I forced in the apartment now have green leaves. The forsythia might have lost its yellow splendour, but the dogwood is getting ready to show off a few bunches of tiny white flowers. And both the dogwood and the forsythia are beginning to show signs of roots!!! NEW PLANTS!!!
If they survive long enough they will end up in the Hedgerow toward the road, screening our haven a bit more from the outside world. More blossoms in spring, more variegated leaves in summer, more red dogwood stems in winter.
I picked some sedum stems last autumn as part of a bouquet of flowers for the apartment, and as the rest of the flowers faded the sedums started creating roots in the vase. I threw the rest of the flowers away, cut down the sedums to a few inches, and all through the winter they’ve stayed alive in a glass of water on the kitchen table. Yesterday morning I decided that spring had arrived and that perhaps in a month there might be room in the garden for the remainder of a bunch of flowers, picked for their beauty and retained so that beauty might regenerate. So I potted up the small stems with their fragile roots and tiny leaves.
It was propagation by accident, but I kept them alive. I watered them, nursed them and loved them – willed them – alive. It’s the greatest feat of magic imaginable, isn’t it?
What great surprises of new plants and compost to start a new bed…ah spring and all the lovely chores!
The Accidental Sedum will go into the Ambitious Border; the Sunny Border will be for the roses that my parents gave (okay they haven’t been ordered yet) my husband for his birthday, as well as for the dahlia plants that I hope to grow from seed.
Love the names of your borders! And yes, I think sticking something in some dirt and it living is definitely magic! Have fun this weekend spreading compost!
The names make it easier for me to visualise each border, somehow.
And it will be terrific fun when I get to dig in the compost and create a nice soil for plants to grow in; I just have to get that turf up first, which will be a rather less fun job. Still, it must be done!
3 cheers for new plants from nowhere! I love the Accidental ones like that–somehow knowing a plant from its cradle, so to speak, makes it more meaningful, too, at least to me. (This can be a mixed blessing when it hits its wild and unruly years.) Your idea of allowing beauty to regenerate is a lovely one.
I have it the other way around; I have some perennials that have known me from my cradle, since they come from my parents’ old garden. (Iris, goldenrod, rudbeckia and others.)
The sedum shouldn’t get too unruly, though; it doesn’t spread too much and is generally a well-behaved type of plant. (The forsythia and dogwood branches, though, will be permanent adolescents once they’re established, constantly needing firm discipline and a good pruning back.
I didn’t realise you could get forsythia to root in water. Will have to try that. Sedums are brilliant plants for easy propagation. My garden is stuffed with them now but they all came from 2 different plants. You can even propagate them from the leaf.
When we got rid of our lawns we stacked the turf up in a corner and covered it with some black plastic, a year later we had beautiful loamy soil that we filled our raised beds with. We’ve just made another path at the allotment so we’ve got a new turf stack. I just need to find something to cover it with.
Hope the weather is good for you this weekend for your al your gardening work.
They do that quite easily, but I think the reason most people never see this is because it only starts happening a few weeks after the flowers have all fallen off the branches (so most people will have chucked the branches before they have a time to root).
As for the sedums I know they are easy to propagate, but I just love the idea of picking flowers for a bouquet and ending up planting them out into the garden again.
I like the idea of turning the turf into loam; I’ve generally just made mounds out of my turf cuttings (or in one instance a small turf wall as a retaining wall for the raised Hedgerow), but I might try your technique. (If I can find a place to put it that is out of sight from our garden and the neighbours’!) On the other hand, it might not be a bad idea to continue my turf wall theme and create some more in other parts of the garden where I want to raise the ground level a little. Or perhaps a turf seat?
I too am not fond of the plastic edging and also found it does not stop the most ambitious of weeds and grass. We kick edge the beds which is a lot of work, but it keeps us more vigilant to the invaders. I like how you named your beds. I have clients that do that. My garden is too small for them to carry a moniker, though.
We have very few deep-rooted weeds, perhaps because the water table is so high that most plants don’t need deep roots. Even our largest dandelions only have 8-inch roots… So the 8-inch deep barrier ought to stop most things.
As for being vigilant, that’s not really an option for us, since the garden is so far away from our apartment. (2 hours by public transport means I normally go there every other weekend.)
The naming is not stricly necessary, but I do find it helps me visualise each part of the garden (13,500 sq. feet). It’s not a VERY large garden, but it does have a size where different areas have very different growing conditions in terms of light and temperature.
[…] Gardener A while ago, A Woman Keen On Sensible Footwear (a.k.a. Wellywoman) commented on one of my resent posts that she wasn’t aware that forsythias would root in […]